Radio

Music to my ears

Next time the Tories choose a new leader - and please God it will be years before they do - they might consider bringing in Classic FM to help with the selection process. On Thursday night I went to a concert at the Barbican, broadcast live on Classic FM, National Public Radio in America and Latvia Broadcasting. The purpose of the evening - glamour, good food and entertainment aside - was to choose the winner of the third Master Prize International Composers Competition, whose six finalists' symphonies, chosen from 1,000 entries in 65 countries, were played by the LSO.

What a performance - and I refer almost as much to the voting as to the music. William Hague would have been impressed. It was Hague, if you recall, who introduced the new method of voting which lumbered the Tories with IDS, chosen not by MPs but by the party. It was democratic but it wasn't informed.

The Master Prize judging was both - thanks to the elaborate judging system which gave 45 per cent of the vote to the worldwide audience via the internet, 40 per cent to the jury of 10 distinguished musicians, 10 per cent to the LSO and five to the Barbican audience, a well-balanced brew of gut feeling and expertise. Sadly, the tango from Latvia didn't win, but I bow to the professionals who chose a cerebral piece called Rainbow Body by the Texan composer.

Here's where I put on my hair shirt and apologise for the rude things I have said over the years about the Classic FM play list and its penchant for schmaltz - classical muzak. No other radio station has committed itself so wholeheartedly or so generously to promoting serious new music, and I'm not thinking only of the £25,000 awarded to Thursday night's winner. Over the past few months, 13 youth orchestras throughout Britain have been playing the six new mini symphonies coached by musicians from the LSO. They, too, had a final, judged by Vladimir Ashkenazy, which must have boosted the morale of young musicians nationwide no end.

It's not often that I allow television to do things better than radio. Last Thursday, however, listeners definitely missed something. In the German entry, enigmatically called You Must Finish Your Journey Alone , a strange whooshing sound was made by timpanists scrunching plastic carrier bags, possibly the ones the youth orchestras had brought their sandwiches in for rehearsals. Germans are obsessed with recycling.

In my enthusiasm for the Master Prize final I almost forgot that we do have another classical music station, although a recent conversation I had with a fierce young woman representing the Friends of Radio 3 suggests otherwise. She has been bombarding controller Roger Wright with emails demanding more classical music on his network and far less jazz, folk, world, contemporary and film music which, she says, is not what Radio 3 listeners want.

I suspect that what she really wants is 3B FM, a station devoted exclusively to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. I'm happy to take any schedule RW cares to throw at me providing it includes Discovering Music. Charles Hazlewood in the seat beside me at every concert I attend is the only prize I want. Failing that, a Hazlewood crib that I can listen to with one ear, like simultaneous translation. Last week he was analysing a new concerto for violin and orchestra by Pullitzer prize-winning Israeli composer Shalumit Ran. She was there, too (it was the British premiere of her piece), and must have been well chuffed at Hazlewood's enthusiasm for what he called 'her extraordinary masterpiece, a lament for the inevitability of loss'. No carrier bags for Ms Ran, though she did use an instrument called a vibraslap which sounds more suited to massage parlour than concert hall.

The only time I've ever seen Barbra Streisand - interviewed exclusively (whatever that means) by Russell Davies on Radio 2 - was when she was waiting for a massage at a health club in Tring. She wasn't looking great then, but she certainly sounded great on radio, talking about her life, career and currently blissful marriage. She has a lot to be happy about - two Oscars, 11 Golden Globes, six Emmys, 48 gold albums, 28 platinum albums, 13 multi-platinum albums and a tidy income from the sale of 67 million albums.

To mark Safe in the Nation Week, Colin Morris investigated The Christian Conundrum. There are three kinds of Christians, he said: a, b and c. I'm a b Christian - the ones who favour occasional visits to cathedrals rather than regular ones to parish churches, and get their religion from media God slots like his.

Radio is about great voices, which made Dylan and John, about the friendship between Dylan Thomas and John Arlott, a runaway winner. I loved the picture of them going on pub crawls and ending up in a Camden undertaker's because Thomas loved the fellow's lugubrious voice almost as much as his irreverent jokes about corpses with erections that stopped the coffin lids closing. Laddish culture isn't new.

Sign up for the Guardian Today

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.